……A Tribute from the Facebook page of Lanre Arogundade
That you were a chip off the old block was not in doubt; and could never have been in doubt.
If Gani, your father was a god of thunder in the revolutionary movement, you were a god of iron.
The iron-willed radical activism in you meant that confinement to the wheel chair was not a barrier to speaking truth to power and participating in pro-people protests for justice and end to brutal exploitation. You demanded for free education. You demanded for free health care. To the best of your ability, you also deployed your legal services to the defence of the cheated and the deprived.
If Gani, bubbled with amazing energy, you oozed energy enigmatically. So energetic were you in your youthful days that you would dash to the Airforce base for drills to the admiration of airforce personnel even though you were not a soldier.
Once, while Gani was in one of his several incacerations, I had come around to cheer and interview your mum. When she called on you to bid me farewell you jogged over with sweat cascading down your body. Asked why, you said you had been exercising but since there was still much energy left in you, you decided to start drawing water from the well and pouring it on the grass and flowers just like that. You said you were not done and would resume the unusual exercise after my departure.
If you shook someone and jerked the arm, the person would be floor bound except you yourself quickly intervened. My wife, who once worked at Nigeria Law Publications on Lagos Island always recall how you would regularly fly up the stairs in just two or three steps to grab the phone for a call and launch into fluent Ondo dialect, just like Gani himself and of course your mum, brothers and sisters.
When Gani was picked by security agents shortly after he defied the Abacha junta to launch the National Consceince Party in 1994, you grabbed a car and pursued his abductors who struggled to shake you off. When you returned in the evening you were full of triumphal excitement that you gave the security agents a good chase in your bid to know where your father was being taken. Of course, at the Ikeja GRA home and at the Anthony law chambers, the rattling sound of the car wheels was your arrival signature.
The close knowledge of such abundant energy made your 2003 motor accident very devastating. Yet, you took it all with uncommon equanimity such that, like Gani, you remained your humorous and lively self. Countless times, whenever we meet, we would jointly mimick your father either before or after the exchange of the ‘MUO, MUO; Lanruze, Lanruze’ pleasantries. Between you, Saheed your younger brother and myself, it was always a competition who could mimick Gani the most. Such moments elicited joyous smiles from friends, associates comrades and relations, especially your mum.
Like Gani, you were always there for friends and comrades, outside the common or usual arena of struggle. And so you were at Ilesa and Ijebu-Jesa for two days in October 2012 for the funeral ceremonies of my father, Thomas Akinyemi Arogundade, including the service of songs, the thanksgiving service and the reception.
With your death therefore, myself and the Arogundade family have lost a close friend and brother.
No doubt, this will be another blow too many for your Mum and siblings, but we count on the Almighty God to comfort and strengthen them.
We’ve shed our tears and we would likely shed more. What is left is to commit your lively soul into the hands of the Almighty God.
Adieu, Egin mi MUO!
